Global Groove 2004: Nam June Paik in the Deutsche
Guggenheim
Nam June Paik is a
pioneer of the electronic media. Since the sixties, the vision of the
nearly total mediatization of the world has found new and innovative forms
of expression in his video works, objects, and installations. The Korean
artist, who lives in the United States, is currently presenting a new
multiple-monitor installation in his exhibition "Global Groove 2004,"
which can be seen from April 17 through July 9 in the Deutsche Guggenheim
Berlin. This recent installation combines his video experiments from four
decades with a high-speed cut-up comprised of pop music, performance
footage, and manipulated television imagery.
Nam June Paik: Global Groove, 1973, Video Still
Courtesy of Electronic Arts
Intermix
©Electronic Arts Intermix
As a celebration of media art,
Global Groove 2004 will transform the
Deutsche Guggenheim into a dynamic space of surfaces and screens filled
with moving images. Paik's first major art installation since the laser
projects he created for his retrospective
The Worlds of Nam June Paik at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York, Global Groove celebrates the
artist's return to Berlin, the site of many of his earlier triumphs.
Nam June Paik: Global Groove, 1973, Video Still
Courtesy of Electronic Arts
Intermix
©Electronic Arts Intermix
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In a dynamic environment of TV-screen walls and monitor
groupings, the visitor is confronted with a visual flood of altered TV
imagery and video sequences: dancers moving in time to rock music, Pepsi
commercials, drumming Navajo Indians, psychedelic swirls of color, the
grotesquely distorted face of
Richard Nixon, footage from contemporary news coverage, game shows, and
soaps - and, again and again, the bodies and voices of those musicians,
writers, and artists that wrote history together with Paik himself
crystallize out of this dizzying spin:
John Cage, Merce Cunningham,
the Beat poet
Allen Ginsburg,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, the New York
Living Theatre, the cellist and performer
Charlotte Moorman. The installation utilizes elements of Paik's trademark
"video walls": monitors installed in compact grids for the purpose of
cacophonously orchestrated video screenings.
Global Groove 2004 takes its title from Paik's legendary videotape
Global Groove (1973) which proclaimed the future of a global
artist's television. Broadcast in 1974 on
WNET/Thirteen in New York, Nam June Paik's multifaceted Global Groove
would become one of the most influential and legendary examples of video art.
Produced in 1973 at WNET's
Artists' Television Laboratory, Global Groove took an
all-encompassing view of culture that epitomized Paik's artistic approach
to television and the medium of video for broadcast. It transformed the
broadcasting studio into an experimental venue for dancers, musicians, and
performance artists. In celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the
Global Groove broadcast, Global Groove 2004 presents an
installation that will feature Paik's global television projects from the
late 1960s and 1970s. Re-mixed with Global Groove will be the
single-track works
9/23 Experiment with David Atwood (1969),
Suite 212 (1977), and
Merce by Merce by Paik (1975-78) all of which celebrate his
distinctive image processing and his collaborations with other artists.
Nam June Paik: Global Groove, 1973, Video Still
Courtesy of Electronic Arts
Intermix
©Electronic Arts Intermix
The framework of Global Groove 2004 in the Deutsche Guggenheim is
created by an austere and minimal video installation that harks back to
Paik's closed circuit works of the sixties and seventies. Similarly to his
famous work
TV Buddha (1974),
One Candle (1988) confronts the subject with its likeness in a
sensuous and philosophical manner. Two video cameras capture the moving
image of a burning candle, which several projectors shine large-scale onto
the gallery walls in the TV colors blue, red, and green. This is one of
the few video projections Paik has made: the space becomes filled with the
vibrant overlapping images of a flickering candle appearing in a variety
of mixed hues. While the 'real' candle slowly burns down, time becomes
palpable throughout the process of image projection. One Candle allows us
to experience transitoriness in a paradoxical way - both our own and that
of the media images that inundate us on a daily basis.
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